


Proximity and Chance

by Whreflections



Category: Night at the Museum (2006 2009)
Genre: Angst, Break up sex, M/M, Makeup Sex, sort of, though it can also be taken as
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:25:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3152216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years ago in London, Larry Daley and Ahkmenrah's relationship ended abruptly with the decision to leave the tablet and Ahkmenrah himself behind.  </p><p>Now that the tablet's back in New York Larry can't resist a visit to the museum, though he swears to himself he's going only for the sake of the one goodbye he didn't properly get to make.  </p><p>Only, goodbye isn't what Ahkmenrah wants either of them to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proximity and Chance

**Author's Note:**

> You know what's kind of hilarious? 
> 
> I've been writing snippits of Jed/Octavius fic that haven't gone anywhere since 06. And then I go see this movie tonight, and basically trip and write 3,000 words of Larry/Ahkmenrah lmfao 
> 
> Anyway, strangely as it occurred, I'm actually really happy with the way this turned out. I hope someone else enjoys it. ^^

_If finding love is just a dance_

_Proximity and chance_

_You will excuse me if I skip the masquerade_

_-Waiting in the Weeds, the Eagles_

 

As he steps inside the museum doors Larry tries not to think of much it feels like coming home.  He lingers instead on the whisper thin doubt, too quiet to have stopped him, that warns that he shouldn’t have come.  After all, he’s already said all his goodbyes. 

Still it feels good to be there( _home_ ) again, to breathe in air heavy with magic only to let it out quick in laughter as Texas trots up to nuzzle his pockets, looking for sugar cubes.  He’s caught up in a whirlwind of greetings, passed between Teddy and Attila and so many others that it’s dizzying, until he turns to find too familiar eyes so close it’s all he can do not to step back.  (He wonders, not for the first time, about the color of the Nile when it was young, if the water was ever so pure and rich a green.) 

Larry blinks, struggles to recover ground.  “Hey.  Hey!  I see you brought the family.”  He’s seen nothing of them yet, honestly, but it’s what springs to his tongue, as good an unsteady start as any. 

“Larry Daley.”  If he heard the question there, Ahkmenrah  gives no sign.  All he divulges is in the way he says Larry’s name, a greeting and a caress layered with reproach that Larry is sure he can feel.  Maybe, though, that’s only his guilt. 

Larry clears his throat, and tries again.  “Hey, look, we should-  c’mon, you have to tell me about London.”  Larry reaches out to pat his arm, means only to lead him away from the crowd and off down the halls to relative privacy, but it’s been too goddamn long.  He draws his hand away a little too reluctantly, thumb skimming across soft skin before he reminds himself it isn’t fair, it isn’t right.  He gave up the right to touch three years ago. 

Ahkmenrah might well be considering that very thing in the long moment he looks Larry over, but his decision when he makes it is in the crook of his lips, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes.  “It’s been an adventure, I can certainly tell you that.  Come.” 

They fall into step, familiarity taking over the farther down the halls they walk.  When the party is only a distant noise and they’re passing a fairly private stretch of painted pottery behind thick glass, Ahkmenrah speaks again. 

"I wasn’t sure you’d come.  I thought for so long you’d come to London, but the more time passed I began to assume you’d meant it.” 

There is no doubt on the ‘it’ he means; Larry remembers all too well. 

_You know I have to go back, and you, your place is here now.  You have to see that and maybe, hell maybe it’s for the best you know?  What did we think was gonna happen with this anyway?  It’s alright.  This isn’t a bad thing._

“I did.”  And he had, too, no matter what the words had taken from him, how they’d burned and twisted on the way out.  He’d been strong enough to say them, because one of them had to be.  “I mean we-  It was never gonna last forever; it couldn’t.  We both knew that.”

“Did we?  As I recall you talked and I listened.”

“Hey, I-“

“I listened, and you left.”  There’s pain in his voice, raw and real and Larry can’t take it, he fucking can’t.  His hand lashes out, closes tight around Ahkmenrah’s wrist to spin him to a stop.

“What did you want from me, huh?  We’d just gotten you back to your family after a few _thousand_ years; what kind of an ass would I be to say ‘oh by the way, you still want to come back with me to New York, right?  That sound good to you?’ “

“The kind of ass who gives me options?”  God, he’d almost forgotten how much he hates and loves the way this kid argues, the arch of his eyebrows, the way his words are enunciated just a little more clearly.  While he’s distracted and staring, Ahkmenrah wrenches his arm away, leaving Larry’s stomach to lurch at the loss.  “If you’d asked-“

“I know.”  Larry can’t bear to hear him say it; he can’t.  He already knows exactly how it would sound.  He should, at least—he’s imagined it enough times. 

“You _don’t_ -“

“Yeah, I think I do!”  Frustrated, Larry paces a few steps closer to the corner, to the hall that leads down to where they first met, but Ahkmenrah isn’t following.  He turns back, though he can’t look up.  “I’d have asked you what you wanted, you’d have said you wanted to come back with me because…because you’re…because we were—“

“Because I _lov_ —“

“Because you’re young, and you think that’s how the world works!”  Larry hadn’t noticed it so much when they’d first met; he’d slid into the knowledge instead, learning it piece by piece from the light in Ahkmenrah’s eyes, from the jubilance in his laughter and the strength in his arms.  He was so very young, a life cut short and put on hold only to be resumed under circumstances he could hardly have been prepared for.  “You’re young, and you were raised a _Pharaoh_ and you think everything’ll just work itself out because it always does but—“

There’s hands against his chest, hard and firm.  There is relief in their roughness, in the way Ahkmenrah handles him like the boy’s veins run with fire and steel.  His arm is a hot line against Larry’s chest and he can feel the huff of his breath, steady and sharp. 

“I am _not_ a child.”  No, he certainly isn’t, but he’s no man of Larry’s age, either.  He’s an eternal youth, and if Larry was an eternal middle aged man, he wouldn’t mind it, he wouldn’t.  He’d throw every vestige of societal propriety he still carried out the goddamn window and give this everything he had, but he’s no Pharaoh, not even a figure of wax or cotton.  He’s just an aging guy from Brooklyn who’s learned not to hold on too hard or too selfishly to what he can’t keep. 

Larry swallows, lets his head fall back against the wall.  “Maybe not.  But whatever had happened, you were always going to have to let me go.  Sooner’s best for everybody.”  It is, he _knows_ it is, from his heart to his head, but Ahkmenrah is pressed against him, staring him down like he’s trying to burn some other truth out of him and at the end of the day, Larry’s only a man.  (And why, why did he come back here tonight if not to give them both the goodbye he couldn’t in London, in a room full of strangers and family and all their pairs of prying eyes?)

His breath hitches, and that’s all the invitation Ahkmenrah needs.  His kiss when it comes is brutal, deliberately sharp with desperation and anger, but he slows when Larry accepts him, hands coming up to knock his crown aside.  The gold clatters when it hits marble and Larry ignores it, too transfixed by the cropped hair he rakes his fingers through, the way Ahkmenrah swallows the soft groan he makes as if it’s life and breath. 

Larry pulls back, breathes heavy as their lips brush and their air mingles.  They have only ever done this here, at the museum; quick encounters in back rooms and hidden spaces, pleasure taken behind the shadows of columns.  If this is to be his goodbye, he might as well make it properly. 

His ribs squeeze against his heart, and Larry squeezes his fingers against his lover’s hair, gently.  “Hey.  Come take a walk with me.” 

 *****

The walk is quiet, and though Larry knows Ahkmenrah has to have puzzled out where they’re going, he starts to wonder if this might all go more awkwardly than he thinks.  That is, he wonders until they step inside his apartment and the door clicks shut.  By then, Ahkmenrah is reaching for him, and Larry’s anxious worries screech to a halt. 

There is a fluidity between them that he remembers, an ease of muscle and skin and bone he’s never felt anywhere else.  (He knows; he’s tried.  It was never there with his wife, never there with his first love or his second.  It was absent, too, from the men he’d taken into his bed in the last three years—four of them, though none had lasted more than a week.  All younger than him, all dark haired.  If he never speaks of those failed attempts, it’ll be too soon.) 

This, it’s as thick with magic as the museum air, full of heat and need and the kind of shivers that tremor through his body when Ahkmenrah moans wantonly against his neck at the first grope he takes of the bulge of Larry’s cock against his jeans.  Already, he knows this is a memory he’ll want to keep. 

Larry twists them around, presses Ahkmenrah to the door and drops to his knees.  It’s been awhile, but his muscle memory is sound, his hands sliding swift beneath the robe that trails below his breastplate.  In one motion he flicks it up just high enough to expose his cock, just enough to lean in and nuzzle at the inside of his thighs.  They’re soft and the scratch of stubble on his cheeks is new, for them, and Ahkmenrah’s response is all he could have hoped. 

He cries out in his own tongue, grips Larry’s hair so hard it hurts but he wouldn’t change it, he wouldn’t change a thing.  Larry repeats the motion once and again, turns his head to suck and bite against tender skin, leaving marks that won’t last past the dawn.  He only takes Ahkmenrah’s cock into his mouth when he’s so eager for it his hips have started to cant forward, beyond his control. 

The first time he’d gone to his knees for the Pharaoh like this, he’d lasted moments only, had come with a sharp cry and looked down at Larry with eyes bright with awe and affection and desire.  He was no virgin, but no man had ever given him the pleasure of their mouth, or so he’d said it.  (And Larry had laughed, lightly, not to make fun but out of joy at pleasing him, at giving him a first no one could take.  He’d moved to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand but Ahkmenrah had reached for him, hands greedy, and then they were kissing and kissing…)

Now, he can hold out a little, long enough to fuck into Larry’s mouth with shallow thrusts, a litany of murmured words half English and half Egyptian trickling from his lips.  When he can take no more his nails scrabble at Larry’s shoulder, sharp even through his shirt. 

“Please, I need— I don’t want—“

Larry slides off with a wet sound that makes his own cock throb, licks his lips before he shushes him.  “ ‘s alright, I know, I know.  We can—“  He gestures blindly over his shoulder, to the mess of a couch underneath pillows and blankets and books and papers.  “On the couch.” 

Ahkmenrah nods, begins to struggle out of his breastplate.  Before he can get lost watching Larry turns and gets to his feet, ignores the twitch of muscle in his thighs to walk as steady as he can to the couch.  Almost everything goes to the floor in a few sweeps, all but a thick pillow he leaves on the end.  Before he can turn Ahkmenrah’s arms are around him from behind, tugging at his belt, his shirt. 

“Off.  I need to see you.” 

A quiet, flitting thought mutters _there’s nothing to see_ , but the boy doesn’t see him that way, he never has.  He may not understand it, but that much seems to be true—he can almost believe that were they to do this every year of his life, he’d still be wanted, still find that his Pharaoh’s hands melded to his body like water seeping thirstily into sand. 

For the sake of that certainty, he lets Ahkmenrah undress him(this _last_ time; it must be), lets him touch to his heart’s content.  Or, at least, until his cock is leaking steadily against his lover’s wrist, rising to meet strokes that are too good to endure.  Larry breaks off from a kiss with swollen lips already turning a little sore and nods toward the couch, breathless. 

He means to say _lay down_ or _get on your knees_ or anything, anything at all to keep the moment all its own, but as he tugs open the end table drawer to pull out the lube, their eyes meet and words fail him.  No matter how much he might seem it sometimes, in some ways, Ahkmenrah is no child, not really.  The knowing is right there in his gaze, in a flicker of grief and jealousy so fast it hits Larry like the kind of wound that bleeds before its felt. 

He rushes to close it, fumbles with the bottle as he sidles up behind Ahkmenrah to guide him into place, raining kisses across his shoulders.  He goes to his hands and knees in silence, though the tension bleeds away beneath Larry’s mouth and crooked fingers.  In his eagerness he’s not overly deft but he knows the body beneath him with a lover’s intimacy, and that’s all he needs to do it right.  He knows just how to stretch him, where to stroke and when to press harder.  (There is a sound he makes, low and guttural that means if Larry gives him more _right there_ , he’ll curse in Egyptian in a voice so thick and low with arousal it sets off a white hot twist of need in the pit of Larry’s stomach.) 

By the time his cock is sliding against the cleft of his ass(a masterpiece so beautifully muscled Larry often moans as he kneads it, ridiculously aroused by the heft of it alone), Ahkmenrah is trembling, needy enough to push back and beg. 

At the first thrust Akhmenrah whines, his hips jerking in an aborted motion to both hump against the air and take Larry’s cock further.  Behind the lust and the hooks that tug in his heart until he reaches down to smooth a hand down the boy’s spine to soothe Larry thinks, _remember this.  You have to remember this._  

 *****

By a quarter to three, they’ve drifted to Larry’s bed.  He lies on his back, eyes closed, listening to the whir of the fan above and the steady breath of his 3,000 year old lover ghosting against his chest. 

“It doesn’t have to end like this, you know.” 

So much for ambient silence.  Larry tries to smile, finds the back of Ahkmenrah’s neck by feel and turns to kiss his forehead without cracking an eye.  “It does.  You know it does.” 

“No.  I don’t.”  The sheets shift and Ahkmenrah rises on one arm to lean over him, palm pressed warm but firm against his belly.  “You aren’t old, Larry.  Not yet, and even when you are if I stay here, the tablet will keep you strong.”

“And when I die are you gonna grave rob me out of the cemetery and hide my body in the basement?”  Whether Ahkmenrah chooses to believe it or not, he’s given this a lot of thought.  He’s already seen every end; he knows not a one of them is pretty. 

“You may not die at all.  We’ve never tested the effects of uninterrupted exposure to the tablet on the aging, perhaps—“

Larry opens his eyes, presses his fingertips to soft lips still damp from kisses.  “Merwet…”  He says it all wrong; he can see by the humor in Ahkmenrah’s eyes.  “I butchered that, didn’t I?”

“You did, a bit.”  There’s a catch in his voice that could break Larry’s heart, if it wasn’t already well past it. 

Shit, his eyes are burning.  “Yeah, well what I mean is…you know what I meant.  And the rest is that you’re gonna have to let me go.  Now or later, you’re gonna have to let me go.”

For a moment, there is panic in his eyes that makes him look every bit the boy Larry is constantly convincing himself he isn’t, but it solidifies, tempered in a way that matches the firm set his jaw takes. 

“And if I should choose later?” 

Internally, Larry sighs.  “Yeah but it’s not—That’s not what I meant, I meant—“

“I know what you meant, but I don’t agree; am I allowed a voice or aren’t I?” 

He can’t be, he _can’t_ because if they do this again, for however long it lasts, there will be no turning back.  Maybe there already isn’t.  Larry tilts his head back and watches the fan, counting iterations of its turn by the Spiderman sticker Nicky had once pressed to a single blade. 

“I can see the Pharaoh in you sometimes, you know.”

“Just sometimes?”

“Mm.  I mean—“  He’s silenced by a kiss, and the gentle, pleased curl of fingers through the sparse hair on his chest.  Ahkmenrah nestles closer, tucks himself in so tight against Larry’s side they’re thoroughly entangled. 

“My father, he knows what I am.  I told him once, years ago, before his death.” 

Larry’s mind flickers with a dozen headlines of righteous parents and dead young people, and his fingertips flutter against Ahkmenrah’s ribs.  He never has asked him how he died. 

“Yeah?”

“He told me that I could have all the men I wished, so long as I married a woman who would still not object to giving him heirs.”  Larry hears his smile, feels it against the juncture of neck and shoulder.  “I have thought often, if you had been born in my time—“

“Ah, I’d have been a slave, and your father—“

“I would have freed you.”  Ahkmenrah’s voice rose, talking over him with a ring of certainty Larry didn’t have it in him to debate.  “I would have freed you and made you my consort and no one could have taken you from my side.  Not in life, and not in death.  You would have shared our pyramid, and we would never be apart.” 

“Sounds like a dream.”  The worst part is, he can actually almost see it.  “Not such a bad one, either.”  Except, no Nicky.  Even for Ahkmenrah, he couldn’t give up his boy. 

“No.  It isn’t.”  Ahkmenrah trails his fingers across Larry’s chest, tracing hieroglyphics.  “I’d have been your king.  I could command you not to leave me.” 

“You could.”

The barest kiss brushes against the curve of his jaw, light as air.  “Or I could ask.” 

There is breathless hope in his whisper, both jagged and fragile. 

Larry turns to face his lover with the Nile in his eyes, and kisses him. 

**Author's Note:**

> The word Larry butchers is his attempt at the Egyptian word for love, written 'mrwt'. Given that no one alive (other than Ahkmenrah and family in this verse, lmao) knows what Ancient Egyptian sounded like spoken, Larry's attempt at pronouncing it is sweet and well meaning but a little off. Still, Ahkmenrah gets the point, ;) lol


End file.
